Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Shelly Duval, now a target of horrible men like Dr. Phil, was the glue that made THREE WOMEN work. Robert Altman made one of his strangest movies with this one. Shelly and Sissy Spacek work in at a retirement home and over the course of the film change personalities. I wondered if it would hold up, but it did. Shelly is just odd enough to bring it together. Sadly. she got more odd over time. The third woman is Janice Rule who never quite makes sense to me.

Monday, November 21, 2016

I guess most people would choose Andy Taylor or Ralph Walton from earlier generations or perhaps
Coach Taylor from more recent shows (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS), but if I had to list my favorite TV Dad, it would be Jack Arnold (Dan Lauria) from THE WONDER YEARS. He was the beleaguered father I remember from my childhood. He wasn't always perfect like the fathers we tend to hold dear: You could feel his dissatisfaction with his lot in life, his disappointment in various issues, his tiredness: was anyone ever more tired. The series was inspired by A CHRISTMAS STORY and you can see the similarities in this character especially.
Jim Anderson on FATHER KNOWS BEST, Ward Cleaver from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, Steve Douglas from MY THREE SONS, and a hundred fathers that followed them were all great Dads but I will take Mr. Arnold. .He was never the generic father.

Friday, November 18, 2016

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE. -This is an amazing novel on my
second reading, decades after my first. Its characters are few, they are
pretty much nailed to one spot, and not much action takes places. Its
high quality depends on Jackson's ability to create characters that
speak and act like real people despite being essentially ghosts. You can
easily see the mind that created both THE LOTTERY and THE HAUNTING OF
HILL HOUSE in this novel. It was her last novel, written in 1962, three
years after HILL HOUSE.

The Blackwood family lost four of its members six years earlier. Since
then Mary Katherine, a teenager, her older sister Charlotte and the
elderly and ill Uncle Julian haven't strayed farther than the country
store. Uncle Julian lives completely in the past, reliving a specific
day in time. Charlotte spends her time cooking, canning and hiding. And
Mary Katherine (Merricat) dreams and devises spells to protect them. The
townspeople thinkCharlotte got away with murder and Merricat's trips
into town incite their rage and amusement at the Blackwood's fate. When
Cousin Charles comes to stay with them, he sets events into motion that
send the family even farther into isolation. He is a villain you can
really hate.

The writing in this novel is sublime. Jackson creates a world that is
both seductive and frightening. I read this as a teenager but I think it
takes an adult to appreciate what strong characters Jackson created.
Jackson died at age 48. What a loss. I can only imagine the novels she might have written if she had lived longer.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

HANDMAIDEN takes some patience at 2 1/2 hours but it pays off as director Park Chan-wooktakes you through the same story from three POVS. It is at heart both a love story and a noir story. Maybe too much torture and it verged at times on soft porn but it is so artfully done and so fascinating in its unspooling that we gave it more leeway than usual. This is apparently based on FINGERSMITH, a Sarah Waters novel, which I now want to read.

MOONLIGHT looks at three periods in the life of a young black gay boy who suffers bullying in the early episodes. Another film that is put together well and will break your heart. Especially at the very end.
Would love to see the play this is based on IN MOONLIGHT BLACK BOYS LOOK BLUE. Although the three actors don't look alike at all, it works because of the similar feeling each one brings to the role.

Here we have three women, well four really, at crossroads in their lives. The most well conceived story was perhaps the final one where a young Native American girl mistakes a temporary teacher's interest in her for more. I did find the Michelle Williams segment rather enigmatic. But still well worth seeing. Kristen Stewart has certainly turned in some fine performances.And Laura Dern is always a treat.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Monday, November 07, 2016

What book has been on your TBR pile the longest? For me it is DOWN AND O UT IN PARIS AND LONDON, which I have had since the 70s without reading. I remember a friend, now gone, telling me it was his favorite book so when I saw it at a used book sale I picked it up. I think since it had not spoken to me itself, I felt no read commitment. But why have I hung on to it so long when many other unread books have came and went. It's because every time I start to discard it I read how it mean something to someone. Just recently someone in BY THE BOOK said just that. Or I think of the fellow who recommended it and feel I owe it to him to read it. Though I don't.

What has been on your TBR pile the longest? Do you expect to ever read it? Why have you held on to it this long?

Friday, November 04, 2016

(from the archives)R.
Narvaez I Am Thinking of My Darling, Vincent McHughA
virus. The City. Civic chaos. Government collapse. The stuff of zombie
flicks and terrorist scenarios in 2010. But back in the ’40s, such a
plot could still be light-hearted. In Vincent McHugh’s 1943 novel I Am
Thinking of My Darling, a virus infects New York City—but it's a happy
virus! The infected follow their bliss, feverishly losing their
inhibitions (for you Trekkies, think "The Naked Time" episode). The
problem is that no one wants to work. Honestly, who would?

Acting
planning commissioner Jim Rowan returns home from a trip to DC to find
cheerful chaos quickly spreading across town—and his actress wife
Niobe missing. She’s infected and on the lam, looking to live out a
succession of character roles in a kind of Method fervor. Meanwhile, in
an emergency management meeting (consider what that term evokes today),
the mayor announces he has the virus—and would rather play with model
trains than lead the City. To avoid panic, Rowan is secretly made
acting mayor.

The plots
riffs genially from there, with Rowan hot on the trail of his slippery
wife, cabbing from City Hall to Harlem across a Cityscape in Mardi Gras
mode—all the while consulting with civil services to keep things
running and with scientists to find a cure. (The fact that the virus
apparently originated in the tropics, implying that people there are
inhibition-less, may be another artifact of the past.) A polymath (when
being a polymath was simpler), Rowan narrates in sensual, informed
detail about now-bygone architectural wonders, regional accents, lab
science, and jazz music.

This
book, with its glad-rag view of a long-lost era, has been a favorite
of mine since it was recommended to me decades ago. (I still have my
first copy, bought in the now-bygone Tower Books in the Village).
McHugh, a poet and a staff writer for The New Yorker in the ’30s,
employs a prose style that winks slyly at Chandler and pulp. (Once
Rowan is inevitably infected, he’s like Marlowe on E.) Darling also
features a nice amount of sexual frankness that may surprise modern
readers who forget that people in the ’40s had sex. The novel was made
into the very '60s movie What's So Bad About Feeling Good?, but by then
the times had already been a-changed enough that the conceit no longer
had the right kind of jazz.

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Very early on, before I was properly writing crime stories, Ed Gorman reached out to me through my blog, offering encouragement and eventually a spot in two or three of his yearly anthologies. He wrote reviews of forgotten books most weeks, he sent me several of his books that he thought I would like. I think he shared this sort of relationship with many, many people. He offered to feature my books on his blog. In other words, a man who hadn't much time-- made time for a fledgling writer. I will miss him every day because I regard the people who write for FFB as my family. We never met in person but that's not really necessary any more. Now here are some other words.

A PHONE CALL FROM ED
Max Allan Collins

Thirty-five years ago or so, I got a phone call. I was in my basement
office in the middle of something, but I answered it. There was no
caller ID then, though I wasn’t getting all that many phone calls,
anyway.
This very distinctive, friendly but strangely shy voice
identified himself as Ed Gorman. He lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (about
sixty miles from my home, Muscatine) and was a writer himself, although
he told me this in a modest, dismissive, almost embarrassed way.
Any call from a would-be writer sent up a warning signal. I had
already been at it long enough that I was getting calls from local and
area writers (and sometimes farther afield than that) wanting help that
usually consisted of reading their book and/or giving them advice on
getting published.
But this call didn’t seem to be like that.
Ed Gorman was calling specifically to tell me how much he loved my
QUARRY novels. At that time there were only four of them, published in
1976 and ‘77, and while the stirring of a cult reputation for the books
was out there, this was different.
This obviously very literate,
self-effacing, intelligent man knew all about the books and really,
really liked them. He had been compelled, he said, to give me a call
about them - which was something he’d been thinking about doing for a
long time.
We talked for about an hour, and hit it off, both
having rather dark senses of humor, but then he rather abruptly said he
had to sign off. He had something he had to do. I asked him what, and
he said, “I’m getting married in half an hour.”
In a way that’s
all you need to know about Ed Gorman. He was a writer who wanted to
tell other writers that he admired them, and why. He was funny and
quirky and uniquely Ed – that he had chosen to call me out of the blue
about QUARRY right before he was off to get married to the beautiful,
wonderful Carol, seems so very wrong and so perfectly right.
We
began talking on the phone regularly – so regularly, and for such long
conversations, that I used to get in trouble with my beautiful,
wonderful wife about the phone bill. I learned that Ed had been
primarily a literary writer, with short stories appearing in various
publications of that sort (it was much later that he revealed he’d also
written short stories for low-end men’s magazines). He said he wanted to branch out into novels.
As he came to know, and as I have said before in public, one of my
proudest accomplishments as a writer was helping turn Ed Gorman into a
novelist. He particularly took to one piece of advice. I said, “Think
of every chapter as a short story. That won’t intimidate you – after
all, you’re already a short story writer. And, anyway, with a chapter,
you need the same coherent beginning, middle and end as a short story.”
Very soon he sent me a novel.
It was good. There was a problem
with the ending that I told him about, and he took it well, and
gratefully. Then I learned he had thrown the book away and started
over. I felt terrible about it, and for the only time in our
friendship, I balled him out. I am someone who never throws any piece
of writing away, a chronic recycler, and what he’d done appalled me.
But he was impulsive and eccentric and his own harshest critic, so his
action was as in character as it was rash.
Ed and Carol visited
Barb and me in Muscatine, and we did the same with them in Cedar Rapids.
Carol and Barb are writers too, very good ones, so the conversations
over the years were four-way, not the boys over here and the girls
over there.
It took me a while to learn that Ed rarely traveled, and that he was in
fact something of a hermit. Because we both lived in Iowa, and had
writing styles that were not dissimilar, I for a time had the honor of
being accused of using “Ed Gorman” as a pseudonym. What a writer that
would make me.
“Is it true,” people would ask me, “that you’ve actually met Ed Gorman?” I actually had.
The thing is, being around people made Ed nervous. This still strikes
me as strange because he made his pre-writing-career living as an ad
man, PR guy and also writer of political speeches (politics being a
lifelong interest, even obsession).
Stranger still is how
charming and effortlessly social he was on the telephone. Scores of
writers are bound to now come forward and say how well they knew him,
but admit that they never met him.
I saw him quite a bit, at
least comparatively speaking. With Carol and Barb, we met at
restaurants; he and Carol came to book signings of mine (he very rarely
did his own); we did a number of appearances together (doing Q and A as
well as signing, at the late lamented Mystery Cat in C.R.
and
elsewhere). Despite his extreme discomfort with crowds, he came with
Carol to periodic screenings of my films at the Cedar Rapids Film
Festival (sitting way in back).
For a number of years Barb and
I, and writers Bob Randisi and Marthayn Peligrimas, would meet Ed and
Carol for quarterly get-togethers at the Ox Yoke Inn in the Amana
Colonies. These were lively, frequently hilarious bitch sessions about
the writing life. Bob was a great friend of Ed’s (they started Mystery
Scene together), and is a great friend of mine. Writers know a lot of
other writers, but mostly it’s friendly acquaintances. Bob, Ed and I
were real friends.
At Terry Beatty’s wedding some years ago, Ed –
who loved Terry and his work – made an unprecedented move by attending
the reception. I might be slightly overstating, but Ed was damn near
the life of the party. Laughing, chatting, circulating. I was
astonished.
Later I asked him, “What happened to Ed Gorman, the
guy who can’t stand being in even the smallest crowd?” He told me he’d
been a nervous wreck at the reception, a total screaming mess inside. I
had witnessed an amazing performance.
Once, responding to my efforts to get him to a Bouchercon,
Ed told me didn’t like driving long distances because he’d been in a
car crash. I asked him why he didn’t fly there. He said he’d also been
in a plane crash. I asked him why he didn’t take a train. He said
he’d been in a train crash. Asking him why he always took the stairs in
tall buildings, he said he’d once been in an elevator when it fell.
There’s also a story about an escalator, but you get the drift.
Was he kidding me? I’m not sure. Really I don’t think so. He was a
self-described bundle of neuroses, yet as grounded a writer as I’ve ever
known. He worked hard and well and fast, and never compromised his
craft and art. Now and then he would rail on about some writer whose
work he disliked, but never in public, and no one had more generous,
enthusiastic things to say about other writers and their work than Ed.
Mystery Scene was in part about getting writers who were otherwise being
ignored their due by way of articles and reviews. He worked with Black
Lizard and founded Five Star to get books and writers back into print.
I think it’s fair for me to say that no other writer in our genre ever did more for his brother and sister writers.
In 1992, around Thanksgiving, I got a double career whammy when my DICK TRACY contract was not picked up, and my Nathan
Heller novel contract was unexpectedly cancelled. I shared my woes
with Ed. Suddenly I had short story assignment after short story
assignment from Ed and his great friend, Marty Greenberg. Ed and Marty
keep me afloat for six months while I regrouped. They were also
responsible for turning my wife Barb into a writer, largely with
assignments for stories in the CAT CRIMES anthologies.
Ed was
the most widely read writer I’ve ever encountered. He knew mystery
fiction inside out, and he shared with me his great love for Mickey
Spillane, John D. MacDonald and Rex Stout, among many others. But he
knew science fiction just as well, and he had read all of the classics
and literary novels from all sorts of eras, and bestsellers, too. I
suspect he was a speed reader, but maybe he was just obsessive.
He was film literate, too, though his opinions often flew against
critical opinion. He never cared for John Ford, for example, with the
exception of THE SEARCHERS. He loved Robert Ryan — his favorite screen
actor. My head is as filled with his opinions about popular culture as
my own (simplified by our many, many areas of agreement). One area of
disagreement: he didn’t like the Beatles but loved the Stones. I always
told him he didn’t have to choose
Ed, of course, had a dark
side. This came across as black comedy for the most part, and I heard
for many decades his prediction that we were nearing the end of
mystery-fiction publishing. It was over! Sometimes his gloom got to
me, and Barb would say, “Were you talking business with Ed again?” I
started making a habit of making him laugh when I could see that he was
letting bleakness get to him. Of course, we’d always laughed together,
each an easy mark for the other.
He was always complimentary
about my work and gave me glowing reviews, and he was the first to
really recognize any value in QUARRY, and he kept that up over the
years. Surprisingly often, he would call and say that the night before
he’d re-read one of the books, and make my day with effusive praise.
I’ve never had a phone call like that from anybody else.
If for
some reason you’ve never read Ed Gorman (which I doubt, if you’re coming
to this blog), I have always been partial to the Jack Dwyer series, in
part because I got to read the first one, Rough Cut, in manuscript. His
horror novels, as Daniel Ransom, are first-rate. He was a terrific
western writer, as well – Guild is a favorite of mine. The Poker Club
became a good little film, though not as good as its novel source. And he was the best short story writer of my generation – seek out his collections.
In the last twenty years or so, I talked less with Ed on the phone –
though still fairly frequently – as e-mails and blogs kicked in. His
voice always had something apologetic in it, like he was afraid he was
interrupting. He never was.
Those phone calls – and a phone
call was where it all began – are precious to me now in my memory. How
we laughed and laughed. What I’d give for another call from Ed right
now. Me and a hundred other writers. But I’m the only one he called on
his way to his wedding.

From Dave Zeltserman

I
suspect dozens of other writers are going to be writing similar
tributes as mine, and 10000s of readers are going to feel the same way
about Ed as a writer as I did. That was because as a person, Ed was one
of those rare people who’d go out of his way to help you, and he was
just such a damn nice guy, and as a writer not only did he craft beautiful
prose but he filled his stories with a such unique human quality no
matter how dark the story. Ed was proud to be a genre writer, and
excelled at it in all genres that he wrote: Westerns, mysteries,
thrillers, and horror, and both short stories and novels. I don't know
if this was much of a secret but Ed didn't much care for literary
'artiste' types. To Ed, the point of writing was to tell exciting
stories that drew the reader in, and few did it better than Ed. Partly
because of Ed's love of these genres, and partly because of his overall
decency, there are few out there who championed newer writers like Ed
did.

I
never got a chance to meet Ed in person, and during the 15 years that I
knew Ed we only talked a few times over the phone, but during those
years we exchanged 1000s of emails over just about everything: books,
politics, movies, television, the state of publishing, what was going on
with our lives, Orson Welles, you name it, and just as Ed’s strong
humanist qualities and decency came through in his writing, they
likewise did with his emails. Just a great guy. And a great writer.
That’s the easiest way to sum Ed up. Someone you can love like an older
brother even though you never met him. Someone who’s passing makes the
world just that much colder.

Ed,
rest in the peace you so much deserved. Like everyone else, I don’t
know if there’s anything after this life, but if there is, I’d like to
think you’re right now with your buddies Tom Piccirilli and Marty
Greenberg, hanging out with Hammett, Stout, Cain, and the other greats trading stories.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

I don't think I had seen this since I saw it as a kid at the theater. It holds up pretty well because the script is succinct and doesn't try to do too much. The inability to mount special effects probably saved it because the remake doesn't look too promising.

An English town falls into a trance and some months later every woman of child bearing years gives birth to children who look alike and are gifted intellectually. This has happened in other places too but only this group of kids survive.

George Sanders defends them for a while, seduced by their brilliance, but eventually everyone realizes it's us or them. It's not hard to draw parallels with today's fears of having strangers in our midst. A sequel CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED is supposed to be good also.

About Me

Patricia Abbott is the author of more than 125 stories that have appeared online, in print journals and in various anthologies. She is the author of two print novels CONCRETE ANGEL (2015) and SHOT IN DETROIT (2016)(Polis Books). CONCRETE ANGEL was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity Award in 2016. SHOT IN DETROIT was nominated for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award in 2017. A collection of her stories I BRING SORROW AND OTHER STORIES OF TRANSGRESSION will appear in 2018.